23. The Updated Haversack Ruse
As early as 1939, a British intelligence memo, thought to have been written by Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, contained a useful ruse. It drew on a successful World War I deception plan, cooked up by a British officer named Richard Meinertzhagen, that came to be known as the Haversack Ruse. In that earlier deception, a bloody haversack that contained British secret plans was “dropped” by an ostensibly wounded British officer, for the Ottoman Turks and their German allies to find. The Turks and Germans believed that the haversack’s contents were authentic, and acted accordingly, to their detriment.
Ian Fleming’s updated version of the Haversack Ruse upped the game. Rather than simply plant misleading papers in a bloody haversack or its functional equivalent for the Germans to find, they would be planted on a corpse, that would then be found by the enemy. So in early 1943, British intelligence set out to find a corpse as the first step in a deception plan labeled Operation Mincemeat. Finding a corpse turned out to be a bigger hurdle than they had imagined.